Simple Effective Weight Loss

"Fortunately, there are many specialists and others who welcome new ideas. Such people will improve on these new ideas much more effectively than I ever could - and I will support their efforts in every way of which I am capable."

BW: I noticed as I read the book that particularly in part one, you tend to make the same point in a number of different ways.

AAA: Yes. Although most of these ideas are not really new, as I show in part two, they are often very unfamiliar in the context of dieting, nutrition, and weight-loss. So it helps people grasp them more easily if they're presented from several different viewpoints.

BW: I assume that's also the reason you use "The Beast" idea?

AAA: Right, that metaphor came to me very early in the writing process and I was delighted to discover such a simple, irreverent way to describe a powerful but stupid "sub-mind". This helps people a lot, because once you understand that you are dealing with a sub-mind, it becomes very easy to "outwit" it, so to speak. Scientists will of course understand that I'm talking about the homeostatic phenomenon, but my term, "The Beast", is a lot simpler and more fun for everyone else, especially me.

BW: Your use of humor is kind of unique in a diet book.

AAA: Thank you for saying so. When I first started thinking about writing TMD, I went to a bookstore and leafed through some of the more popular diet books that they happened to have.

My main impression was of a bunch of deadly dull diet doctors talking down to all the "stupid little people". I decided right there that I was going to avoid that nonsense by every means I could think of. Of course people must judge for themselves how well I succeeded.

BW: Why did you choose the name "Multi-Diet"?

AAA: There were two reasons:

The technique uses the valid insights from all earlier diet techniques.

The threshold theory takes these insights, and adds some new ones, and explains how to manage these multiple factors in order to make weight-loss easy and effective.

So we thought that "Multi-Diet" was a fairly accurate, "easy to remember" term to describe that multiplicity.

BW: It's also easy to trademark.

AAA: Yes, my publishers, who are as unusual in their approach to things as I am, made sure the book was designed to take such commercial things into account.

For example, when we started, I made the typical mistake of thinking "Just build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door".

However, my publishers knew that the correct phrase is: "Build a better mousetrap and publicize it for as hard and as long as you can, and only then will the world beat a path to your door - maybe".

They also knew that one way to do this effectively is to give it away. Shocking!